Diabolical Lies – Details, episodes & analysis

In this conversation…

The picture heard ‘round the Reddit Popular page has reignited the internet’s favorite form of is-that-misogyny? debate: Ladies, are we allowed to talk about what may or may not be happening on Taylor Swift’s face?

Plastic surgery speculation is an online sport in its own right, but the real story is what it tells us about our culture’s attitude toward cosmetic procedures (and the “feminist” way to participate) that the mere suggestion ignites such a fervent defense of Swift’s honor. The grand, widely celebrated deception of dermal filler is the foundation on which this melodrama is built.

Bonus Reading

“How long do dermal fillers really last? MRI scans provide evidence,” from Victorian Cosmetic Institute, a 5-year-old YouTube video clearly outlining the little-discussed long-term effects, plus this sort of clickbait-y follow-up about the risk of dissolver “destroying [your] face” by the same doctor, that explains how the dissolver—a substance called hyaluronidase—works

“Hyaluronic Acid Filler Longevity in the Mid-face: A Review of 33 Magnetic Resonance Imaging Studies” in the Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery-Global Open journal, July 2024

“On cosmetic procedures and the limits of ‘destigmatization,’” by Haley Nahman, November 2022

“In the Name of Beauty,” Tressie McMillan Cottom, 2019 (highly recommend this entire essay collection, Thick)

“Allie Rowbottom is no botox moralist,” by Brock Colyar for New York Magazine (also recommend Rowbottom’s novel, Aesthetica)

“We’re Having Fun, Right?” (Katie’s essay mentioned in the episode, about the unique psychological torment of entering a Sephora)

Down, Girl: The Logic of Misogyny by Kate Manne, which offers a definition of misogyny that focuses not on feelings of hatred toward women, but the social systems that enforce a patriarchal set of standards in women’s behavior

to see what terrifying ground we’ll traverse next, subscribe for more 🤠

Time Stamps

0:15:00 - let’s talk about that viral picture of TS looking “crispy”

3:30 - Caro self-therapizes about why she has so many blind spots as a Swiftie haha lol

8:37 - Katie gives a crash course in filler (how it works, how we understand and misunderstand it)

18:00 - some thoughts on the effort to dEsTiGmaTiz3 Be@uTy, LadiEZ!

23:00 - the more injectables are democratized, the more that famous people will distance themselves from the endeavor

25:05 - caro claims botox as her latest roman empire, katie immediately chops her off at the knees

31:20 - do we no longer believe that beauty standards are dangerous?

32:23 — theory #1 regarding why people are so effing defensive about TS getting work done (keywords: feminism, honesty, amnesty, Alix Earle)

36:50 - theory #2 regarding why people are so effing defensive about TS getting work done (keywords: code switching, the aryan movement, branding)

38:40 - how race theory plays a foundational role in the plastic surgery/injectables conversation

44:20 - Katie’s Grand Unifying Theory of Filler™

51:35 - is it maybe a good thing that we’re culturally freaked out by injectables?

53:50 - theory #3 regarding why people are so effing defensive about TS getting work done (keywords)

55:50 - theory #4 regarding why people are so effing defensive about TS getting work done

57:00 - theory #5! how! high! will! they! go! (keywords: thinkers, objects, commodifiers)

1:01:50 - why the “my body my choice” argument is bullshit in the context of cosmetic surgery/injectables

1:05:00 - on the importance of being ruthless with systems and kind to people

1:09:50 - why beauty is the only form of capital that women are encouraged to pursue 🫠

1:12:45 - the irony of happiness myth surrounding the beauty standard (“I do this because it makes me happy/feel good!”)

1:19:50 - ever notice how women are allowed to age if they’re in artistic fields where their faces are hidden/obscured by their art, whereas singers and actresses basically face forced retirement before they can even develop their craft?????

1:26:00 - Katie and Caro make a lifelong blood oath

in this episode: caro & katie debrief on the bama rush / rushtok phenomenon, through the lens of katie's experience going through alabama rush 10 years ago and the deconstruction process that followed.

101s on the latest gender panic event at the Olympics

“The Right-Wing Campaign to Purge Women from Women’s Sports” — The Intercept

“Boxer in Controversy Over Eligibility Lets Her Gloves Do the Talking” — New York Times

“Imane Khelif and Western Delusions of White Innocence” — Al Jazeera

“Imane Khelif Fights The World's Greatest Boxers—and Bigots” — Qasim Rashid Substack

some helpful 101s on debunking gender panic/trans hysteria

The New York Times's War On Trans Kids — If Books Could Kill podcast

Alok Vaid-Menon interview — Man Enough podcast

“No link between trans-inclusive policies and bathroom safety, study finds” — NBC News

“Arguments that trans athletes have an unfair advantage lack evidence to support” — NPR

the zeitgeist giveth an inch, and caro & katie taketh a mile. if you liked this, subscribe for more!

In this conversation

* What even is free will?

* What the follow-up article means about the response

* The Venn diagram between fundamentalist Christianity and white supremacy is a circle

* Where we go from here

We’ll be releasing these types of conversations as the zeitgeist allows. Subscribe for more!

Resources

Primary cited sources 

Meet the Queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children)

My day with the trad wife queen and what it taught me (second article, audio embedded)

Vimeo video 

Ballerina Farm explainers

Tradwife Life as Self-Annihilation, Culture Study

The Myth of Making It, Culture Study 

The Unbearable Daniel of it All , Influenced (Sara Petersen)

How Mormons Churn Out the Most Influential Tradwives (Caro)

Deconstruction Recommendations

Celeste Davis Substack

Mikki Kendall TikTok

Daniella M Young Cult Deconstruction 

Reddit thread for ex-mormons 

Our first bonus episode! The first 40 minutes of this conversation are available to everyone, but if you'd like to become a subscriber, join us on Substack or Apple Podcasts.

In this conversation…

A critique of work that best illustrates different elements of the, “I used to be a liberal, but…” media personality that purports to have invented a bold new form of centrist, independent thinking—but upon further inspection, it’s…just conservatism, often cloaked in the language of the left.

In this conversation…

Two pre-menopausal females break down the replacement theory panic disguised as Reasonable! Political! Concern! and why it’s completely unnecessary and counterproductive to entertain the pronatalist conversation on their terms: that is, litigating the validity of having (or not having) children. It is not, and has never been, about the kids.

Bonus Reading

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, which really puts the whole “the traditional, natural order is the nuclear family with the man at the helm” into historical context

Sisters in Hate by Seyward Darby, an absolute banger about the girlbosses of white nationalism

“White Noise,” a documentary about Richard Spencer, Lauren Southern, and Mike Cernovich’s rise to viral fame ha ha ha everything’s fine!

“The Housewives of White Supremacy” by Annie Kelly, a piece that traces the current anti-feminist resurgence to economic precarity and a mythic past in which everyone had sugar daddies and three-bedroom starter homes

“The Cultural Politics Behind JD Vance’s Obsession with ‘Cat Ladies’” by Jacob Rosenberg for Mother Jones, an interview with Dr. Melinda Cooper about how “the legalization of same-sex marriage has shifted the line of deviance from sexuality to reproductivity”

“Pro-Natalism” on In Bed with the Right, featuring some of the commentary we discussed from feminist writer Moira Donegan

“Warren Hern, America’s Abortion Doctor,” a New Yorker interview conducted by Jia Tolentino with the only octogenarian doctor on the planet that we will personally beg not to retire

“Roe Was Never Enough Anyway,” a critique of the landmark abortion case in Boston Review by Rachel Rebouché, in which she casually points out that Roe NEVER ACTUALLY GUARANTEED ABORTION ACCESS TO BEGIN WITH HAHA K COOL

“What the ‘Mississippi Appendectomy’ Says About the Regard of the State Towards the Agency of Black Women’s Bodies,” a historical analysis that, fair warning, will radically change your relationship to our nation’s history, and to the practice of colonialism writ large, if you aren’t familiar with this topic

“Israel Gave Birth Control to Ethiopian Jews Without Their Consent,” ha ha ha ha ha here we go again same story different colonial project cool cool cool no biggie

…and a funny little tiktok to reward you for reading so much depressing shit<3

Time Stamps

1:00 Katie sets the scene for the conversation, and makes a startling admission in the meantime

5:00 enter, stage left: the interview where JD Vance acknowledged his wife’s skin color in the most American Psycho way possible

8:00 Caro takes a moment to shit all over Megyn Kelly

10:00 let’s talk about how *~meaningful*~ it is to have kids, no wait we mean economically important, no wait we mean personally meaningful, NO WAIT —

16:00 if you’re wondering whether republicans give a single shit about babies/families/women, take a gander at how they engage with labor unions

21:00 the sneaky little fact that no one discusses in the birth rate conversation

25:00 let’s talk about how tenuous the connections are between marriage, child welfare, and child stability

32:00 who decides what is “natural” and “human” and what is not?

35:30 the first cracks in the pronatalism argument become evident

37:00 let’s discuss the Quiverfull movement!!!

48:00 exploring the cultural roots and propaganda campaigns that motivate women to lean into the pronatalist movement

59:30 how the republican party harnesses the fuck out of nostalgia to make us perceive their DEEPLY IMPRACTICAL goals as highly practical and maybe even inevitable

1:05:00 the part where we realize this episode is literally the sequel to agriculture wars

1:08:00 let’s address the elephant in the room, the elephant in question being *checks notes* the virtual elimination of teen pregnancies being somehow bad

1:10:00 insert obligatory conservative trans/gender panic here

1:17:00 is the birth rate panic actually a marxist panic in disguise????

1:21:00 Caro offers a rare optimistic call to arms (cherish it when it happens folks)

1:26:00 is anyone else just extremely bored by the ongoing effort to solve the effects of capitalism with more capitalism?

1:30:00 Katie drops the thought banger of the fucking century

In this conversation…

Caro & Katie talk about abortion in America, starting with leaders in the evangelical church recognizing it as a political tool in the 1970s with which to gain power in the face of unwanted desegregation, to the profound discomfort that modern politicians across the spectrum express about the subject—that is, until maybe, right now. It turns out that American women have never actually been guaranteed the freedom to get an abortion, and to begin changing that, we need a new moral framework.

References, Bonus Reading & Timestamps, Oh My

References

“An Irish Problem,” a knock-your-socks-off essay by Sally Rooney about something that is also, incidentally, An American Problem

“Hillary Clinton’s Moral Conflicts on Abortion,” a 2016 profile in The Atlantic that feels, in retrospect, like such an ambulance siren warning for the years to come that it might just inspire you to quit your job, spend a decade or two building a time machine, and go back in time just to try that much harder to get Bernie across the finish line at the DNC

“Obama Says Abortion Rights Are Not a Priority,” a 2009 Reuters article that will make you realize the time machine needs to take you back earlier

“Jimmy Carter Says Jesus Would Not Support Abortion, Revealing ‘Only Conflict’ Between His Politics and Christian Faith,” an article that will make you say fuck it, the time machine effort is pointless, and inspire you to smash the time machine in a field, Office Space-style, because when it comes to Democrats dropping the ball on abortion, the limit does not apparently exist

“Doctors Agreed Her Baby Would Die 3 Months Before She Was Forced to Give Birth,” a Rolling Stone story of a Florida woman who was psychologically, physically, and financially tortured by Ron DeSantis’s abortion laws

The Turnaway Study (2008), a 10-year longitudinal study of nearly 1,000 women who sought abortions—some of whom accessed care and others who were denied it—that found not only do women who get abortions not regret it (95% reported it was the right choice in the years that followed), but those who don’t receive care accurately predict the hardships they will encounter after being denied care

“The Obstacle Course Facing Those Seeking Abortions,” a 2021 interview with reproductive rights expert Carole Joffe that offers insight into just how shitty our “golden age” of reproductive rights under Roe really was

“The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth,” a 2022 piece in Politico in which old quotes from Christianity Today prove how little church leaders cared about abortion, and how in 1971, the delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution calling for the legalization of abortion, a position they reaffirmed in 1974 and again in 1976 (one year and three years after Roe v. Wade, respectively)

Bonus Reading/Listening

“The New York Times’ War on Trans Kids,” a truly stellar episode of If Books Could Kill that highlights the Republican strategy of taking a microscopic statistic/nonexistent “problem” and using it to delegitimize an entire civil rights issue

“Abortion Is Ancient History and That Matters Today,” a lovely CNN debunking of the “abortion = modernity” fallacy we see everywhere

“The Brilliance of Safe, Legal, and Rare,” an Atlantic article highlighting the most annoying “pro-choice” rhetorical argument of all time

Timestamps

0:00 - this episode brought to you by…

1:15 - Diabolical Lies makes its first-ever presidential endorsement!!!

2:30 - lil explainer on how today’s conversation will unfold, featuring a deranged metaphor/Dane Cook deep cut about three monkeys fucking a coconut

4:42 - meet the first monkey that fucked the coconut: the Republican christo-fascist base <3 <3 <3

12:44 - discussing the OG political pick-me, Phyllis Schlafly

17:01 - meet the second monkey that fucked the coconut: the Supreme Court <3 <3 <3

35:00 - addressing the post-Dobbs, T.S. Elliott-Wasteland-esque landscape we find ourselves in today

40:00 - meet the third monkey fucking the coconut, caro’s personal fave: the feckless pearl-grabbing behavior of Democratic leaders over the years <3 <3 <3

51:00 - debunking the absolute horseshit fake-ass drunk history claims of “late-term abortion concerns”

59:30 - welcome to part two of the conversation, where we wave bye bye to the monkeys that fucked us (yes, dear reader, WE were the coconut all along! i love a good mid-novel plot twist!) and say hello to a new framework called reproductive justice

1:01:45 - enter, stage right: famed Irish author and marxist thinker, Sally Rooney

1:08:00 - caro finally follows up on her promise for an optimistic hot take on our current moment lol

1:15:40 - yay we made it to part three where we quit whining and start talking about how to actually solve things (gulp)

In this conversation…

Caro & Katie engage in a close read of the viral Free Press debate TikTok that stars a young woman angry she can’t live on a homestead, and accidentally discover it’s uniquely emblematic of the sort of right-wing radicalization we’re witnessing en masse in the United States.

In this conversation…

Caro & Katie dive headfirst into the “male loneliness epidemic,” “the boys are not all right,” “feminism hurts men” discourse to understand which right-wing think tank’s research suddenly indicates The Men™️ are struggling, its curious timing, and the frustrating tendency of all the coverage to completely gloss over the core problem.

References in this Episode

Of Boys and Men, by Richard Reeves, the man who has penned most of the mainstream coverage on this issue, like this one in the Wall Street Journal

The CNN segment featuring Scott Galloway, “Young Men Feel Abandoned by the Democratic Party”

“How I Escaped the Alt-Right Pipeline,” the video we watched clips of in the second half of this episode that identifies Jordan Peterson as a common entry point

“Alok Vaid-Menon: The Urgent Need for Compassion,” an interview for the Man Enough podcast

“omg enough about male loneliness,” by Clara for Hmm That's Interesting

“On the Ballot: American Manhood,” by Richard Reeves for The Wall Street Journal

“America’s Young Men Are Falling Further Behind,” by Rachel Wolfe for The Wall Street Journal

“How I Escaped the Alt-Right Pipeline,” by YouTuber JimmytheGiant

Bonus Reading & Resources

“Patriarchy is Bad for Men and Boys” from Matriarchy Report

“Why aren’t we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?” from Celeste Davis of Matriarchal Blessing, about the “feminization” of higher education

“Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity” by Michael Kimmel, which is a fancy academic PDF by a sociologist about all the ways “masculinity” is invented and redefined over time

“How an Empty Internet Gave Us Tradwives and Trump” by all-star heavy-hitter Diabolical Lies favorite, Tressie McMillan Cottom, which explains the cultural aesthetic of the “podcast bro”

“Patriarchy Is Bad for Men and Boys, Too,” a banger by Lane Anderson for Lane Anderson

Time Stamps

0:00 - BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MEN? let’s discuss.

3:00 - Hulk Hogan enters the chat because of course

5:00 - *whispers* this is a conversation about identity politics actually!!!

6:00 - understanding Richard Reeves, the architect of the “what about the boys” movement

11:55 - CNN clip #1, in which two bald white men in suits convey their grave concern about the fact that “men have fallen”

14:11 - CNN clip #2, in which those bald white men seem not to realize that “latinos,” “rural Americans,” “ethnic Americans,” “seniors,” and other demographic groups…include…men????

19:10 — final piece of mainstream coverage, in which a featured image on an article says the quiet part out loud

23:35 — what is patriarchy, actually?

28:24 — are the men actually more lonely than other demographics?

32:10 — in case anyone wants to learn more about how the American Enterprise Institute lifts up men <3

34:22 — yes, dear reader, there are in fact women who uphold the notion that men need more time, attention, and resources from this country

50:00 — little tip for the women who want to give up feminist beliefs in order to “fix their marriage”

53:00 — Caro beats the “look at the data” drum

55:50 — Katie makes a huge point

58:30 — we listen to a personal account from YouTuber JimmytheGiant on how he escaped the alt-right pipeline

1:04:00 — Jordan Peterson enters the chat. Is anyone surprised?

1:13:25 — JimmytheGiant offers a v compelling argument for class consciousness as a solution to alt-right ideology drift

1:20:00 — no guys sincerely: it’s hard to overstate how unique America’s brand of “capitalism” is, compared to other wealthy capitalist nations

1:24:00 — Richard Reeves makes his big grand argument

1:29:00 — Katie makes another huge point

1:38:00 — let’s be clear on where the two-party system fits into this conversation

Feminism is in the midst of an identity crisis: What is feminism? What does it mean to “be a feminist”? The gap has created an opening for a few media-savvy writers and thinkers to refashion the movement in their own image: a “women’s rights” movement that uses anti-capitalist language to make things like unprotected sex and unpaid labor look like liberation.

For notes, citations, and bonus reading, check out diabolicallies.substack.com and select this episode.